A dying worm experiences rigor mortis early in the death process, rather than after the main event as it is for humans, according to a new study by an international team of scientists at UCL and Washington University. The study, published in the journal Cell Reports, is the first discovery of rigor mortis in worms and provides new insight into the process of ‘organismal’ death. In legal and medical terms, death is defined as the moment at which the heart…

The Pitt H6 system’s dual high-resolution cameras can take 2448 x 2050 pixel images of Earth from the International Space Station Credit: Swanson School of Engineering In T minus 8,760 hours, or roughly one year, the Space Test Program-Houston 6 (STP-H6) hybrid and reconfigurable space supercomputer will board the International Space Station. The newest mission to the ISS featuring research and technology from the University of Pittsburgh’s NSF Center for Space, High-performance, and Resilient Computing (SHREC) will bring an unprecedented…

A week ago we published a story about new amplification attacks using memcached protocol on UDP port 11211. A few things happened since then: Let’s take a deep breath and discuss why such large DDoS attacks are even possible on the modern internet. Large attacks use IP spoofing CC BY-SA 2.0 image by DaPuglet All the gigantic headline-grabbing attacks are what we call “L3” (Layer 3 OSI[1]). This kind of attack has a common trait – the malicious software sends…

Cloudflare is excited to turn up our newest data center in Istanbul, Turkey. This is our 124th data center globally (and 62nd country), and it is throwing a curveball in our data center by continent tracking. Istanbul is one of the only cities in the world to span two continents: Europe and Asia. Technically, we’ll specify this is our 34th data center in Europe. In the coming weeks, we’ll continue to attract more traffic to this deployment as more networks…

In George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, the Ministry of Peace fights wars and the Ministry of Truth tells lies. In the United States, internet service providers are currently immune from prosecution for sex trafficking carried out by third parties who use their services. Why? Because of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, or CDA. To be fair to the drafters of the original legislation, they really did intend to clean up the Internet, which was a very different place in…

A young engineer works on making a drone entirely built in Cameroon at the Will & Brothers company premises in Douala Talking fast and dreaming big, William Elong shows off the first “made in Cameroon” drone at his sixth-floor workshop in downtown Douala, minutes from the economic capital’s Atlantic seafront. The 25-year-old, known as a high-flyer after being named one of Forbes’ most promising young Africans under 30, is enthusing about his new unmanned aerial drones and keen to promote…

Christian Miranda | Software Engineer, Growth More than half of the 200 million monthly active users on Pinterest use our app outside the U.S. As we continue to make Pinterest even better for our global users, we moved our traffic to country code top-level domains (ccTLDs). An example of this is serving the website on www.pinterest.de in Germany instead of www.pinterest.com. Here we’ll deep dive into the specifics of how this change can help improve growth and discuss some of…

CC BY-SA 2.0 image by David Trawin Over last couple of days we’ve seen a big increase in an obscure amplification attack vector – using the memcached protocol, coming from UDP port 11211. In the past, we have talked a lot about amplification attacks happening on the internet. Our most recent two blog posts on this subject were: The general idea behind all amplification attacks is the same. An IP-spoofing capable attacker sends forged requests to a vulnerable UDP server.…

If you are a small business owner or if you are trying to build a personal brand in your niche, you know how difficult it is to stand out in a competition. It seems to be on the rise every single day. A few years ago, having a website would have cut it for you. You could have easily stood out in the crowd with an online presence. The scenario is not like that anymore. That’s why it is becoming…

As the internet is bringing the world closer day by day, the case of cyber attacks is also increasing daily. The recent news of Adidas getting attacked by cyber criminals or the famous Wannacry virus that infected UK’s NHS computer system through a seemingly innocuous email should be a warning for everyone that no one is safe in this connected world. Phishing has become one of the most popular methods used by the cybercriminals. It refers to sending malicious links…